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While marrying was an expected event in 19th-century Western society and has been subject to much historical research, there are few studies on how disabilities influenced people’s marriage patterns and spouse selection. The aim of this analysis is to contribute clarification on this issue by examining with whom disabled men and women married and the marital age and socio-demographic characteristics of them and their spouses. In total, 188 disabled individuals born in the first half of the 19th century and who married in the Sundsvall region, Sweden, are studied. The results reveal that disabled men and women did not marry each other, and they entered into marriage at a slightly higher age than the average, although there was usually no marked age gap between them and their spouse. Endogamous patterns were primarily found regarding the socio-spatial background of the two spouses. This analysis is one of the few studies identifying the marriages among a comparatively large number of disabled people using demographic data. Their participation in the partner pool highlight their agency historically and emphasize that disability did not lead to distance from social life in past society.

Vad innebar funktionsnedsättningar för människors delaktighet i 1800-talets samhälle? Studien besvarar frågan genom att undersöka över 35,000 unga personers chanser att hitta ett första jobb där levnadsbanan för 15-åringar följs upp närmare. Funktionsnedsättningar medförde svårigheter på både arbets- och partnermarknaden även om det inte var omöjligt att skaffa jobb, gifta sig och bilda familj. Det vittnar om att nedsatt funktionsförmåga innebar ett annorlunda liv och möjligen socialt utanförskap, men inte alltid. Följderna varierade beroende på typ av nedsättning där omgivningens attityder till olika funktionsnedsättningar och könsbundna förväntningar tycks ha spelat roll. Fysiska nedsättningar hade inte lika negativa effekter för arbete, giftermål och överlevnad som psykiska nedsättningar. Resultaten bygger på kyrkböcker digitaliserade av Demografiska Databasens (DDB), Umeå Universitet, där prästerna noterade funktionsavvikelser och händelser i församlingsbornas liv (t.ex. yrke, giftermål, barnafödande). Studien belyser hur levnadsvillkor och möjligheter till delaktighet i samhället via arbete gestaltade sig för individer i historisk tid till följd av funktionsnedsättningar – förhållanden som dröjer sig kvar än idag.

What did a life with disability imply for individuals in a past society? Since disabled men and women have long been hidden in history, the aim with this thesis is to uncover them and their living conditions in nineteenth-century Sweden, represented by the Sundsvall region. The data consist of parish registers, which help to trace people’s life courses and the consequences if disabilities interfered with their lives. These records are digitized and stored by the Demographic Data Base (DDB), Umeå University, Sweden. The dataset under analysis comprises a population of some 36,000 observations from non-disabled and disabled individuals. Life-course perspectives and labeling theories are applied in all four studies in this thesis, even if different methods and events in life are taken into account. Studies II and IV examine the marriage propensities and the spouses, and show that disabled people did marry, and usually with a non-disabled partner in similar age and from similar socio-economic origin. However their marital chances were significantly smaller compared to their non-disabled counterparts. Study I reveals that disabilities implied significantly higher death risks, in particular among the men and those with mental disabilities of both genders. In Study III, the three events of getting a job, marrying and giving birth to a child were explored in parallel. The results reveal that even if some disabled people experienced all these events, they did so to a lower extent than non-disabled persons. Variations were found between men and women and different disabilities. The major conclusion of the thesis is that disabled people constituted a most heterogeneous group of individuals with different obstacles and opportunities in life in a past society, where gender and type of disability seem to have played a part in their level of labeling beyond the impairment itself. 

To marry and form a household of one's own was the expected life course of most people in the nineteenth century, but little is known about whether individuals with disabilities shared the same demographic experience of marriage as non-disabled did. This study examines this issue by analyzing the marital chances of a group of disabled people—i.e. blind, deaf mute, crippled and with mental disabilities—compared with a non-disabled reference group. Our results show that about a quarter of the disabled individuals did marry, even though their marital propensities were significantly lower than those of non-disabled people. These propensities also differed by gender and type of disability. We suggest that the lower marital chances and the variation we found within the group of disabled people indicate the level of social exclusion they faced in society.

This study considers the life courses of young men and women with and without disabilities in the Sundsvall region of Sweden during the nineteenth century. It aims to ascertain how disability and gender shaped their involvement in work and their experience of family in order to assess the extent of their social inclusion. Through the use of Swedish parish registers digitized by the Demographic Data Base, Umeå University, we examine 8,874 individuals observed from 15 to 33 years of age to investigate whether obtaining a job, getting married and having children were less frequent events for people with disabilities. Our results reveal that this was the case and particularly for those with mental disabilities, even if having an impairment did not wholly prevent people from finding a job. However, their work did not represent the key to family formation and for the women it implied a higher rate of illegitimacy. We argue that the lower level of inclusion in work and family was not solely the outcome of the impairment itself, but differed in relation to the particular attitudes towards men and women with disabilities within the labour market and society more generally in this particular context.